February 2009 Print

In Saint-Malo, on this past August 15, during the sermon he gave on the occasion of the Procession to fulfill the vow of King Louis XIII, Bishop Bernard Fellay invited the faithful to read and study a Roman document published in 1950:

I encourage you very much to re-read Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis, concerning modern errors. It is the last great condemnation of the errors in the Church. It has some similarity with St. Pius X’s Pascendi, which condemned Modernism.

In this sermon, following in the footsteps of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X denounced the intrusion of a foreign body inside the Church:

We see this foreign body which spreads something else than the Catholic Church inside the very Church. It wants to be friends with all the religions, claims that you can be saved in any religion, and that the Holy Ghost uses them all as means of salvation. All this is false. It never has been the teaching of the Church! Today we have a Church which is promoting what was condemned less than fifty years ago. And we see that it all happened during the Second Vatican Council. This Council did not so much invent novelties as give its approval to and legalize what was condemned as erroneous ten years earlier.

Indeed, when we read Humani Generis, we can observe that what was said in the document emanating from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 2007, Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church, is singularly drifting away from the teaching of Pope Pius XII who had written:

Some say they are not bound by the doctrine explained in Our Encyclical Letter of a few years ago, and based on the Sources of Revelation, which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. (Cf. Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943). Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.

The recent Roman Note which claimed to bring an answer to the difficulties raised by the affirmation of the Second Vatican Council according to which “the Church of Christ subsists in (subsistit in) the Catholic Church” merely reiterated an attempt at conciliation already proposed in the Constitution Lumen Gentium (I, 8). It said it plainly, while acknowledging its thoroughly paradoxical character:

The Second Vatican Council used the phrase “subsistit in” in order to try to harmonize two doctrinal affirmations: on the one hand, that despite all the divisions between Christians, the Church of Christ continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand that numerous elements of sanctification and truth do exist without the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church whether in the particular Churches or in the ecclesial Communities that are not fully in communion with the Catholic Church. For this reason, the same Decree of Vatican II on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, introduced the term fullness (unitatis/catholicitatis) specifically to help better understand this somewhat paradoxical situation.

Humani Generis clearly stated: “The Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing.” Nowadays, the document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith paradoxically says that there “is full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church.” Yet, the separated Churches, without being in full communion are not “by any means ‘deprived of significance and importance,’” because they possess “many elements of sanctification and of truth.” We note that it is truly in the name of ecumenism that the second sentence is placed side by side with the traditional definition of the Church. Now, Pope Pius XII stated:

Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.

Archbishop Lefebvre in They Have Uncrowned Him wrote explicitly:

The Council took pleasure in exalting the salvific values, or the values–period–of the other religions. Speaking of the non-Catholic Christian religions, Vatican II teaches that “Although we believe them to be victims of deficiencies, they are not in any way devoid of meaning and of value in the mystery of salvation.”

This is a heresy! The only means of salvation is the Catholic Church. Insofar as they are separated from the unity of the true faith, the Protestant communions cannot be used by the Holy Ghost. He can act only directly on the souls or make use of the means (for example, baptism) which, in themselves, do not bear any indication of separation. One can be saved in Protestantism, but not by Protestantism.

If, answering Bishop Fellay’s invitation, we continue with our reading of Humani Generis, we can only see how the analysis made by Pope Pius XII is still relevant now. Thus the Pope, like St. Pius X, did not hesitate to denounce an enterprise of subversion within the Church, all the more pernicious because it hid under the appearance of good:

There are many who, deploring disagreement among men and intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire to do away with the barrier that divides good and honest men; these advocate an “eirenism” according to which, by setting aside the questions which divide men, they aim not only at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism, but also at reconciling things opposed to one another in the field of dogma.

And to carry out successfully this odious enterprise, neo-modernists do not hesitate to question traditional theology and its methods, because, according to them, these

should not only be perfected, but also completely reformed, in order to promote the more efficacious propagation of the kingdom of Christ everywhere throughout the world among men of every culture and religious opinion.

A little further in the text, Pope Pius XII criticized “some more audacious” who held that

the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries.

Justifying the opposition of the Society of Saint Pius X to a new teaching, foreign to Tradition, Bishop Fellay declared on August 15: “We do not set ourselves up as judges. We simply ask the pope of today to explain how what he tells us corresponds to what his predecessors have said.”

In this, the successor of Archbishop Lefebvre was only repeating the teaching of Humani Generis which said that to replace inviolable dogmas

by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind.

Pope Pius XII concluded his encyclical by advising theologians not to think,

indulging in a false “eirenism,” that the dissident and the erring can happily be brought back to the bosom of the Church, if the whole truth found in the Church is not sincerely taught to all without corruption or diminution. In Saint-Malo, Bishop Fellay declared:

We ask the faith from the Church, and we know that the Church alone can give it to us. So, we maintain this first request made at baptism. We do nothing else. We could sum up all our combat in this.

 

The integral translation of the sermon given by Bishop Fellay on the occasion of the Procession in Saint Malo, on August 15, is found in DICI, No. 181, of September 27, 2008. This article is reprinted with permission from Christendom, No. 17 (Sept.-Oct., 2008), published by DICI, the international new bureau of the SSPX. www.dici.org.

Selections from HUMANI GENERIS

(Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine)

1. Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides. 5. Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution. Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism. 6. Such fictitious tenets of evolution which repudiate all that is absolute, firm and immutable, have paved the way for the new erroneous philosophy which, rivaling idealism, immanentism and pragmatism, has assumed the name of existentialism, since it concerns itself only with existence of individual things and neglects all consideration of their immutable essences. 10. However, although We know that Catholic teachers generally avoid these errors, it is apparent, however, that some today, as in apostolic times, desirous of novelty, and fearing to be considered ignorant of recent scientific findings, try to withdraw themselves from the sacred Teaching Authority and are accordingly in danger of gradually departing from revealed truth and of drawing others along with them into error. 11. Another danger is perceived which is all the more serious because it is more concealed beneath the mask of virtue. There are many who, deploring disagreement among men and intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire to do away with the barrier that divides good and honest men; these advocate an “eirenism” according to which, by setting aside the questions which divide men, they aim not only at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism, but also at reconciling things opposed to one another in the field of dogma. And as in former times some questioned whether the traditional apologetics of the Church did not constitute an obstacle rather than a help to the winning of souls for Christ, so today some are presumptive enough to question seriously whether theology and theological methods, such as with the approval of ecclesiastical authority are found in our schools, should not only be perfected, but also completely reformed, in order to promote the more efficacious propagation of the kingdom of Christ everywhere throughout the world among men of every culture and religious opinion. 14. In theology some want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers, to bring about a return in the explanation of Catholic doctrine to the way of speaking used in Holy Scripture and by the Fathers of the Church. They cherish the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be extrinsic to divine revelation, it will compare advantageously with the dogmatic opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church and that in this way they will gradually arrive at a mutual assimilation of Catholic dogma with the tenets of the dissidents. 15. Moreover, they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. 31. If one considers all this well, he will easily see why the Church demands that future priests be instructed in philosophy “according to the method, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor,” since, as we well know from the experience of centuries, the method of Aquinas is singularly pre-eminent both of teaching students and for bringing truth to light; his doctrine is in harmony with Divine Revelation, and is most effective both for safeguarding the foundation of the Faith and for reaping, safely and usefully, the fruits of sound progress. 32. How deplorable it is then that this philosophy, received and honored by the Church, is scorned by some, who shamelessly call it outmoded in form and rationalistic, as they say, in its method of thought. They say that this philosophy upholds the erroneous notion that there can be a metaphysic that is absolutely true; whereas in fact, they say, reality, especially transcendent reality, cannot better be expressed than by disparate teachings, which mutually complete each other, although they are in a way mutually opposed. Our traditional philosophy, then, with its clear exposition and solution of questions, its accurate definition of terms, its clear-cut distinctions, can be, they concede, useful as a preparation for scholastic theology, a preparation quite in accord with medieval mentality; but this philosophy hardly offers a method of philosophizing suited to the needs of our modern culture. They allege, finally, that our perennial philosophy is only a philosophy of immutable essences, while the contemporary mind must look to the existence of things and to life, which is ever in flux. While scorning our philosophy, they extol other philosophies of all kinds, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, by which they seem to imply that any kind of philosophy or theory, with a few additions and corrections if need be, can be reconciled with Catholic dogma. No Catholic can doubt how false this is, especially where there is question of those fictitious theories they call immanentism, or idealism or materialism, whether historic or dialectic, or even existentialism, whether atheistic or simply the type that denies the validity of the reason in the field of metaphysics. 33. Finally, they reproach this philosophy taught in our schools for regarding only the intellect in the process of cognition, while neglecting the function of the will and the emotions. This is simply not true. Never has Christian philosophy denied the usefulness and efficacy of good dispositions of soul for perceiving and embracing moral and religious truths. In fact, it has always taught that the lack of these dispositions of good will can be the reason why the intellect, influenced by the passions and evil inclinations, can be so obscured that it cannot see clearly. Indeed St. Thomas holds that the intellect can in some way perceive higher goods of the moral order, whether natural or supernatural, inasmuch as it experiences a certain “connaturality” with these goods, whether this “connaturality” be purely natural, or the result of grace; and it is clear how much even this somewhat obscure perception can help the reason in its investigations. However it is one thing to admit the power of the dispositions of the will in helping reason to gain a more certain and firm knowledge of moral truths; it is quite another thing to say, as these innovators do, indiscriminately mingling cognition and act of will, that the appetitive and affective faculties have a certain power of understanding, and that man, since he cannot by using his reason decide with certainty what is true and is to be accepted, turns to his will, by which he freely chooses among opposite opinions. 34-36. ...the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter–for the Catholic Faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith. Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question. 37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own...